Organic traffic in the SEO world is always the top priority goal. Every SEO agency you see online promises you to bring organic traffic to your site and every SEO pro and marketer seem to value organic traffic the most.
Now, when you have your own website and doing SEO to increase its visibility on the search results, you have most likely also come across this popular term and wondering why it matters to get organic traffic and if it is that important, then how I can boost it.
If it resonates with you, this blog is going to help you understand:
Organic traffic is the number of visits your website gets without any help from paid promotion and advertisement in the search results. It is the opposite of paid traffic in which visits to your site are generated through paid ad campaigns.
In layman’s terms, when visitors land on your website simply after making a query or using a keyword on Google, Bing or any other search engine without clicking on the ads link or paid search results, they are called organic traffic or free traffic. Since it is free, website owners target organic traffic more than paid traffic.
With SEO techniques, you can get free traffic to your website 24/7, but that doesn’t happen instantly. It takes time for SEO to work and generate the desired results.
Why is Organic Traffic Important?
Organic traffic is considered more important than paid traffic, Facebook traffic, or traffic from any other social media platform. The reason is simple – it is free, and it means your website is gaining recognition without having to deliberately appear anytime in the forms of ads – which most people don’t like. Besides, users who type a query in the search engine have a specific intent, and getting them to land at your website and making them your customers means you are ultimately accomplishing your goals without unnecessary investments.
When you provide visitors with the desired solution or answer their questions with clarity, you are most likely to gain a new customer, email subscriber, or follower naturally.
You may not realize it yet, but people indeed trust websites that appear in the top results of Google Search or other search engines. Thus, if you appear at the top of a search engine, it means your chances of getting organic traffic increase by multiple folds.
Here are important SEO Statistics for 2020 that will help you get useful insights for increasing organic traffic:
The first five organic results on the first search engine result page account for 67.60% of all the clicks. (Source: Zero Limit Web)
91% of all the pages never get any organic traffic from Google and mostly because they don’t have backlinks. (Source: ahrefs)
The top four ranking factors are website visits, time spent on the site, pages per session, and bounce rate. (Source: SEMrush)
In 2019, 52% of all the global online traffic came from mobile, and 45% from desktop devices. (Source: statcounter Global Stats)
70% of online marketers deem SEO more effective than PPC (Pay-Per-Clicks) Model. (Source: databox)
Updating and republishing old blog posts with new content and images can boost organic traffic by 106%. (Source: HubSpot)
How to Boost Organic Traffic on My Website?
Website owners often ask – what are the best ways to increase organic traffic? Many so-called SEO experts try to use tricks and hacks that fall into Black Hat SEO tactics. We recommend avoiding such tactics completely because this way you might get a boost but only until Google notices you. As soon as Google identifies your unethical short-cuts, it’s going to hit your website’s position on the search engine hardly which will take so much time and effort to recover from.
The best way to increase organic traffic on your website is to follow proven White Hat SEO practices – tactics that fall in line with the terms and conditions of the major search engines, especially Google.
Here are some of the best SEO techniques that you should be using in 2021 to get a significant boost in your organic traffic.
1. Build Brand Authority
In today’s time, fake news and scams seem to be ubiquitous. Since Google is now paying attention to E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) factors more than ever, it’s time that you start working on building the authority of your brand.
Although Google is targeting E-A-T mainly in the Health, Financial, and Business sectors, you might see it to be implemented in every other search results soon. In the near future (and in some cases, even now) brands that have higher trustworthiness and authority will rank well on Google Search than websites with keywords and thousands of backlinks.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to provide relevant, correct, credible, and problem-solving content.
2. Be Present at Google Maps
You know that there are only 10 positions on the first search engine result page (SERP), and pages further than the first receive a substantially smaller number of clicks. Since it is not easy to rank on the first SERP or get a top position on the first SERP, you should be looking for other ways where you can score well.
Google Maps is one of the effective ways for local businesses to rank well in their niche and outshine competitors. What’s important and more interesting is that Google Maps ranking appears higher in the SERPs than even the first organic search result.
3. Conduct Competitive Analysis
It is important to know what your SEO competitors are doing, what they are better at, where they are not doing well, and which marketing tactics and software they are using. Analyze their best-performing pages to understand where their organic traffic is coming from and what it is being boosted by. While analyzing your competitors’ sites and ads, focus on the content/keyword gap and link gap. Think of it as a chance to improve and see where you need to make improvements and how you can leave them behind in the competition.
4. Produce Relevant, Quality, and Engaging Video Content
We are seeing more and more video content nowadays and that is because of a solid reason – people love the comfort of learning something through videos rather than having to read and make sense of everything on their own in a quiet place. Most people don’t have the time (and also don’t like) to read a post of 4000 or 5000 words.
So, provide your target audience with what they like the most – videos. Many companies have already started to repurpose their blogs into vlogs so that they can rank on Google as well as YouTube.
Try to fill the content gap through videos by providing information that is missed by your competitors or try to present it in a much better format than your competitors.
5. Incorporate Keywords for Humans, not for Google Bots
You may have not realized but Google’s goal is to provide quality results and content to people and not their bots. That’s why they are continuously working to enable their bots to find sites and content that appeal to humans. So, don’t stuff keywords anywhere or everywhere. Use them with a purpose and where they provide a sensible meaning to your content. It’s important because we, people, get easily annoyed when encounter repetitive or similar words.
6. Earn High-Quality Authority Backlinks for Recognition in the Digital World
Backlinks always remain the top ranking factors and earning them from authoritative sites is a huge challenge. The best and ethical way to get authority backlinks is to create quality content that is unique as well as relevant. Creating compelling content always pays off because that way other sites will be more willing to link themselves to your site. Plus, readers will be happier with your content and will want to come back to your site more often.
7. Optimize for – Page Speed, Mobile Device, and Voice Search
Page loading speed should be higher if you don’t want your visitors to leave your website without even seeing what you have to offer. Thus, your website needs to load quickly. If it is taking more time due to images and videos, then compress them before uploading to your site.
Mobile-friendly sites are getting more weight than those that aren’t. Since more people use their smartphones than desktops to search and query, it has become critical for you to make your site compatible with mobile devices. Besides, Google is also using the “Mobile-First” approach in its ranking factors.
Voice Search is getting increasingly popular and has penetrated homes faster. If you are not optimizing your content for voice search, you are losing a huge amount of organic traffic. To optimize content for voice search, use long-tail keywords and headings in Question format.
Wrapping Up
There are many ways to increase traffic to your site. However, when you are targeting organic traffic, you need to shift your focus from short-term rankings to sustainable SEO techniques that allow you to reap long-term benefits. All the above tips are about getting sustainable results and high-quality traffic that every business wants and search engine, like Google values.
Vijaya Raj Laxmi Tyagi has been an avid content writer for over five years with a keen interest in writing SEO articles and blogs. She also finds great enthusiasm in writing about a vast variety of topics, including gardening, interior designing, health & wellness, and tourism. Her educational background in Computer Science and Engineering has given her an edge to write about technologies that tend to mark a great impression on daily lifestyle and behaviour, while her intrigue towards Mother Nature drives her to discuss green topics.
